Over the years a wide variety of telecommunications features have been developed over the years, such as call forwarding, three-way calling, music on hold, and so forth. When two or more features are applied to a telephone call, however, it is possible that an interaction between the features might cause unexpected or unwanted behavior, such as permitting policies to be circumvented or causing the call to fail. For example, suppose a call is set up via a meet-me conferencing feature, and then a music-on-hold feature is activated during the call. If one of the call participants goes on hold, then all of the other parties on the call will also hear the music.
Typically vendors of telephony platforms attempt to anticipate feature interactions at design time. The limitation of design-time techniques, however, is that it is difficult to anticipate feature interactions that might occur if one or more third parties add new features beyond those in the platform vendor's design. Run-time feature interaction detection and resolution techniques, meanwhile, typically rely on detailed models that can be difficult to maintain in distributed networked environments and can introduce calculation overhead that is infeasible to process during call setup.